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We are familiar with the arguments for and against a Western military intervention in Syria. More telling are the strange bedfellows crowding the No Camp, the Yes Camp and the Yes But Camp.

The naysayers

Anti-war activists and multilateralists have lots of company.

Russia is protecting its only Arab client state and also its only naval base in the Mediterranean.

China, besides opposing foreign intervention in a state’s internal affairs, agrees with Russia that the 2011 U.N. mandate on Libya was stretched by NATO to affect regime change.

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Iran — ever-grateful to Syria for helping it during Saddam Hussein’s 1980-88 war — has stood with Damascus ever since. Syria permits passage of Iranian arms to the Lebanese Hezbollah, which sent troops to help out Bashar Assad.

The Egyptian army does not want war on Assad, either. Besides instinctively standing by a fellow-autocrat, the generals in Cairo, who toppled an Islamist president, do not want Islamists taking over post-Assad Syria.

Syrian nationalists, including anti-Assad ones, oppose western intervention — they have a memory of British and French colonial machinations. They also see Syria as a front-line state against Israel and are suspicious of foreign actions that would weaken Syrian military prowess.

War-weary and economically strapped Europeans and Americans are in no mood for foreign ventures, post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan. Germany and Italy had already begged off before the British House of Commons said No to the cocky David Cameron, ignoring the long-standing bilateral special relationship with the U.S. and casting a long shadow over his political judgment (you don’t call a vote unless you have line up the votes to win it).

Barack Obama understands the war fatigue. But he is also aware of the Republican readiness to paint him as weak and vacillating. So he has dared Congress to say No to a limited war that is backed by Israel (see below) and Republicans who favour “a muscular foreign policy” (Sen. John McCain, etc.)

Finally, there are those who worry that a war would further shatter whatever is left of the social order and unleash more sectarianism and internal balkanization, as in Iraq.

Gung-ho warriors

They are led by Saudi Arabia and other oil monarchs who want Assad out, not because he is an Alawite (a Shiite offshoot) but because they want to reduce Shiite Iran’s regional power.

France, emboldened by its lead role in Libya (under Nicolas Sarkozy) and in Mali (under François Hollande), is leading the European charge.

Reluctant Warriors

Israel wants Assad weakened but not gone — he has long kept the Israeli front quiet. It is also wary of post-Assad chaos. But it does reportedly see value in hitting him as a warning to Iran.

Obama only wants to “a shot across the bow,” without committing ground forces.

He has had no interest in attacking another Muslim nation. He worries that a war on Syria might “actually breed more resentment in the region.”

Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the U.S. can easily “destroy the Syrian air force.” But that might “escalate and potentially further commit the U.S. to the conflict” — which Obama does not want.

An American attack on Syria might prompt Assad and/or Hezbollah to rain down missiles on Israel. Iran might intervene — the last thing Obama wants when a) there may be an opening in the nuclear talks with Tehran under new president Hasan Rowhani, and b) Iran may hold the key to an eventual political settlement with Assad.

Obama knows that a pinprick attack “doesn’t solve all the problems in Syria. It doesn’t obviously end the death of innocent civilians.”

So what’s the point of landing some cruise missiles, of which there are only about 150 on the five American ships in the region?

He feels compelled to because Assad crossed the White House red line on the use of chemical weapons. Obama’s assertion that it’s not just his credibility but the world’s that is at stake is balderdash. The world’s credibility is on the line not because of inaction in the last fortnight but over the last 30 months of Assad’s butchery.

Equally propagandist is Dempsey’s claim that American cannot “resolve the underlying and historic ethnic, religious and tribal issues that are fuelling this conflict.” What is fuelling the conflict is a psychopath ready to kill rather than give up power.

Assad’s use of chemical weapons does violate the 1993 UN Chemical Weapons Convention. But Syria never signed it. Even if it had, violations are punishable only by the Security Council, an authorization that’s not forthcoming.

America never lifted a finger when Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran (I flew with the wheezing victims splayed out on stretchers in a military transport aircraft, from that war front to Tehran). America was also mum when Saddam killed about 5,000 Kurds with mustard gas and sarin in 1981.

Turkey and Jordan could go to war on Syria invoking self-defence — and the U.S. could join them. But that’s far-fetched.

The arguments against attacking Syria are valid only in isolation. They pivot on one point: let the slaughter continue.

Obama should end his dithering by invoking the Canadian doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, adopted by the United Nations in 2005. R2P was designed precisely to stop the mass murder of civilians by their own government. It is the principle that drove NATO’s Kosovo operation, the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia — over the objections of Russia and China. That action was “widely regarded as legitimate,” says Paul Heinbecker, Canada’s ambassador to the UN.

The United States, France and others should bomb Assad and his cronies; hit the military units responsible for use of chemical weapons; silence Syrian artillery; destroy all command centres, airfields, planes and helicopters, thereby significantly reducing the ability to kill civilians or receiving Iranian arms shipments by air.

Stephen Harper says he is “a reluctant convert” to a limited war. That’s a shameful position for one gung-ho about our participation in Libya, conducted to prevent a possible slaughter of civilians, yet ambivalent about an actual ongoing massacre.

He should help gather a coalition of the willing, as Canada did for Kosovo and forced Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table. He should also be offering temporary shelter to thousands of Syrian refugees, as we did during the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

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